Platinum Games changing design process for Bayonetta 3

Platinum Games is busy at work with Bayonetta 3, continuing the story we've seen in the first two games, and studio head Atsushi Inaba recently spoke with Video Games Chronicle about the sequel in their headquarters in Japan, revealing that there's been a change in terms of the design process, compared to how they made the last two.

We also got to hear about the history of the franchise, and how the studio fought to make more Bayonetta games, since Sega owns the IP.

"It's absolutely the truth that there are cases where you want to do a sequel but if you don't own the IP, you can't do it," Inaba explained. "It's that simple, and quite frankly in the case of Bayonetta it took a lot of time and energy to get it to the point where sequels could be made. It wasn't as simple as picking up the phone and asking, 'hey, can we do this?' There were a lot of pieces that needed to fall into place and a lot of negotiating that had to occur."

"That's a pain. That's a hassle. For us as creators, we want to get to the point where self-publishing allows us to own our IP and do what we want with it, including making sequels. So the faster we can have that freedom, the better if will be for all the creators here."

Does that mean we won't see collaborations in the future? Well, not necessarily.

"Quite frankly, what it means is we have a lot of different choices in the way that we want to make games," Inaba added. "There are still going to potentially be games in which we partner with publishers to do big things with big IPs. There might be some co-publishing options where we're doing some of it and they're doing some of it to make a larger game, and there might be situations where we're going to be self-publishing larger games as well."

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